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Reading GH's Skirmish piece on The Noumenon. Ten pages in there has been precisely zero philosophical content of note
Lots of academic nano-history and hand-wringing on stylistic matters, though
The main thrust is missing the point of criticisms. Eg responding to Wolf's accusation of lack of phenomenological methodology by pointing to metaphysical commitments (which end up sidelining the necessity of any phenomenological methodology, so... yeah ?)
The sentence "any philosophical career amounts to a bet placed on the relative long-term importance or unimportance of different currently available research programs" is revealing in its polysemy
The main problem in the piece is that pointing out fundamental disagreements is deemed a sufficient response, with no need to at least gesturing to how these disagreements are to be justified, or even justifiable
You end up with a streak of meta-relativism prominent is Cont circles, as if being interested in different topics was reason enough for staking incompatible claims.
Like, how can one write with a straight face that "Knowledge is Wolfendale’s own obsession" ?
Like, how can one write with a straight face that "Knowledge is Wolfendale’s own obsession" ?
"Knowledge is mining"
Science is fracking
Rationalism is Nuclear
Metaphysics is Solar
You read it here first, folks
Science is fracking
Rationalism is Nuclear
Metaphysics is Solar
You read it here first, folks
*You're* Anaxagoras in this Phaedo analogy, Graham
The Withdrawal section does pick up quite a bit, which is nice, although it still functions under the contention that being Non-Modern (refusing its "Onto-taxonomy") is good by virtue of being different
He does not seem to grasp that Wolf's argument re:Heidegger is not about going against Heidi's self-understanding, but more a ship of Theseus.
Which, after all, is internally consistent : GH's Tool-Being is *really* Heideggerian, even though it retains no *sensual* H-properties
Which, after all, is internally consistent : GH's Tool-Being is *really* Heideggerian, even though it retains no *sensual* H-properties
This is actually a more general feature of intellectual development : we seldom realize that our (tentative) insights garnered from working on theorists might have little to do with that specific theorist, and claim a lineage that is at best genealogical, and often just vestigial
'Tool-being' is actually when you're an intellectual hammer looking for nails everywhere. It's a phenomenology of academia
Getting back to the thing : the main wedge is that Harm. construes all descriptions of the relationship between science and knowledge (or any cognitive value of sci.) as scientism. Or at least there is no clue so far (1/3) as to what a non-scientistic account of science is like
This is how defenses of non-reductionism devolve into talk of "epistemology police". This is compounded by the fact that metaphysical commitments are self-reaffirming so you just end up doubling down endlessly
A recurring thread of the piece is the insistence on novelty, surprise, and monotonousness which is somewhat understandable in a book devoted to answering criticisms, which are bound to overlap. But boring =/= unwarranted so these sleights of hand read dismissive
Ok I started again, and the lack of self-awareness is getting to me.
This is how GH formulates his thesis : "the invisibility of equipment to humans does not just refer to an ‘implicit’ character in our use of them, but allows us to see that the implicit use of things does not grasp them any more directly than explicit perception of them does...
.... and the same holds for causal interaction, which also does not deploy the full reality of interacting objects.”
This is intended to prove that he does not illicitly move from phenomenology to metaphysics.
At this point I might at well just give up and skim through the rest
This is intended to prove that he does not illicitly move from phenomenology to metaphysics.
At this point I might at well just give up and skim through the rest
It's all incredibly lazy.
I really understand @deontologistics ' predicament in writing his book : the only way to address mind boggling statements like "Epistemology is merely a name for a specific ontology, not an entirely separate branch of philosophy" is to go root-deep on the concepts themselves
In order to have a clear handle on, say, the difference between phenomenological and metaphysical arguments (one GH does not recognize), you end up having basically written a short treatise on the subject
Presented without comment : "the OOO methodology is clear — to infer a possible di erence between our experience and reality, and to infer another possible di erence between the relations of objects and their independence from those relations, is one and the same inference."
Love having "highly puritanical attitude towards metaphor"
